I can have people around a lot more because I’m not always chasing them away so I can work on my novel. My non-novel, I mean.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders.

I like to do things quickly because I’m easily bored.

A big man has no time really to do anything but just sit and be big.

I’ve always put everybody else’s child first before my own health, before my own outfit, before my own time frame.

When I write, when I’m going hot, I don’t want to write more than four hours in a row. After that, you’re pushing it.

I’ve read a lot of really great characters in some really crappy stories, where I said, like, ‚Boy I could shine here, but the story sucks.‘ I don’t want to be part of that.

As a cure for worrying, work is better than whiskey.

When you have two busy kids running around the house, returning e-mails is a task, let alone surfing the web.

Yes, and I can sit down on a white piece of paper and work because I don’t believe too much into inspiration, only I’m waiting for inspiration, work and then inspiration may come. It’s a little too easy to say that.

What I have is a malevolent curiosity. That’s what drives my need to write and what probably leads me to look at things a little askew. I do tend to take a different perspective from most people.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good.

Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to gain leisure.

Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.

The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.

Tomorrow is nothing, today is too late; the good lived yesterday.

We all knew this. We all knew that it would take more time than any of us want to dig ourselves out of this hole created by this economic crisis.

Verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things.

It may be that the most striking thing about members of my literary generation in retrospect will be that we were allowed to say absolutely anything without fear of punishment.

It is no good getting furious if you get stuck. What I do is keep thinking about the problem but work on something else. Sometimes it is years before I see the way forward. In the case of information loss and black holes, it was 29 years.

I’ve never had a divorce, but I’ve seen so many of my friends, my sister, my family go through that stuff, so I try to write for the people that can’t write about it. I take on their sorrow, so I’m able to kind of express it, or their joy.

If you’re not producing as much as you consume, or perhaps a little more, then clearly we cannot use the big organization of our society for the purpose of keeping you alive, because your life does not benefit us, and it can’t be of very much use to yourself.

That’s one of the biggest things. Never being home, always traveling, having different interests and focusing on different things, just the time aspect of going back home and seeing them, you don’t have that at all. It was a big sacrifice but, at the end of the day, it was worth it.

I don’t care how busy I am – I will always make time for what’s most important to me.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

I don’t think there’s such a thing as autobiographical fiction. If I say it happened, it happened, even if only in my mind.

Having listened to great songwriters like James Taylor and Carole King, I felt there was nothing new that was coming out that really represented me and the way I felt. So I started writing my own stuff.

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.

I think it all comes back to being very selfish as an artist. I mean, I really do just write and record what interests me and I do approach the stage shows in much the same way.

Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.

Everybody that I was in school with had an uncle or father in the law, and I started to realize that I was going to end up writing briefs for about ten years for these fellows who I thought I was smarter than. And I was kind of losing my feeling for that.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

Pleasure and action make the hours seem short.

I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run.

Why do you want to get a good workout early in the morning? Well, because it sends more oxygen to your brain; it releases endorphins. It puts you in a state of mind where you can crush things, which is where you want to be.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Life is not long, and too much of it must not pass in idle deliberation how it shall be spent.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

When I was 16, I started publishing all kinds of things in school magazines.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

I don’t write with a machine. I write with a pen and a paper, which is what is most comfortable for me.

Once writing has become your major vice and greatest pleasure, only death can stop it.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

I’m just a kid – I’ve got a lot of stuff to do yet.

I write for myself things that I’ve gone through.

Writing is a solitary experience. I’m extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It’s so intimate, I can’t even share it with my wife.

The mixed martial arts way of life will give you focus.

A letter does not blush.

Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work.

Learn to say ‚no‘ to the good so you can say ‚yes‘ to the best.

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

I’m not as goal obsessed as I am process obsessed.

Life well spent is long.

Meditation is difficult for many people because their thoughts are always on some distant object or place. One form of meditation is to label the thought as it appears and then choose to let it go.

The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.